For a non-technical business owner, technology is usually viewed as a necessary burden. It’s a series of monthly subscriptions and hardware invoices that seem to get larger and larger every year. The reality, however, is technology is how work gets done in your business.
Pop culture has given us a vivid, if often frightening, impression of artificial intelligence. When we hear AI, many still picture calculated malice: a HAL 9000, a Skynet, or an Ultron.
The real potential of AI is far more productive; it's less about calculating world domination and more about becoming your organization's most helpful collaborator. Think of it as a JARVIS for your executive team or an R2-D2 for your operational staff: a powerful tool that assists your team in generating ideas, solving complex problems, and completing high-volume tasks. Critically, maximizing this potential doesn't require new hardware; it requires sharpening the very soft skills we already value in our top performers: curiosity, empathy, and resilience.
For all the effort and investment a modern business needs to put into its cybersecurity, it is equally critical to acknowledge each team member's role in an organization’s security protections. Many of your employees, through no inherent fault of their own, are themselves a vulnerability as they allow many cyberthreats into your infrastructure via scams and simple mistakes. That being said, this doesn’t have to be the case.
Listed below: why it is imperative that you train your team to be a cybersecurity asset and how to do so.
Does your business have an internal IT department or dedicated IT resource? We know it can be hard sometimes to find the talent you’re looking for, but that doesn’t make it any less critical. Listed below are some of the issues you’ll want to keep in mind if you want to get an IT technician on your staff.
It isn’t rare for people to subscribe to things and only stay subscribed because the cancellation process is challenging and inconvenient. Nonetheless, the Federal Trade Commission is looking to stop this, adopting a rule that eliminates the capability for businesses to put hurdles in front of cancellation processes.
“Toxic” is a buzzword that is often used these days, but when it is used to describe a business’ work environment, it needs to be treated with deadly seriousness.
If a workplace is a place people don’t like to be, many drawbacks will ultimately impact operations. Thus, it is to your advantage to keep your business as positive a workplace as possible.
Listed below: how to tell if your organization has a toxic workplace and, if so, how to resolve it.
Security awareness training is an imperative process for today's businesses to undergo to have any chance of success. Alas, as much as security software or policy can help, it can only do so much. You also need your team members to be on board, knowledgeable about what they need to do, and motivated to do it.
Listed below are some security awareness training tips.
Businesses have to deal with a variety of different types of problems, but they often don’t see many of the problems that come from within their company. Whether this comes from hackers, disgruntled customers, or unreliable vendors, every business leader constantly deals with some type of issue. Alas, sometimes these problems can come from inside your organization. Listed below is a look at two employee issues that can potentially cause major headaches for business owners.
It can be challenging to deal with failure in any context, but in the case of your workplace projects, it can be especially harsh. This makes it all the more imperative to frame such failures as opportunities to grow in the future.
Listed below are six reasons an initiative may fail and the lessons that can be learned from these situations.
Cyberattacks will only continue in the weeks, months, and years to come, making it increasingly essential that businesses have access to cybersecurity expertise. Even more unfortunately, professionals with this level of expertise are becoming harder to find. Globally, we’re short almost four million people, and those we have are prone to make mistakes in their first few years. This comes from a report by Kaspersky, entitled “The Portrait of Modern Information Security Professional,” Let’s review what the cybersecurity developer found and what we can take away from these findings.
It isn’t easy to be a member of the workforce right now. While we won’t cover them in detail, plenty of stressors related to and separate from the workplace can easily impact an employee’s performance. As a result, it is often in your organization’s best interest to invest in your team’s well-being, and one way to do this is by implementing and encouraging the use of different technologies.
This goes out to all the business owners, managers, department heads, and other leaders in the workplace who have to field user complaints and issues.
Being in this position can be difficult, because you often have to say no. No, we can’t change the timeline or increase the budget for this project. No, we can’t do XYZ that way because it would break compliance. No, we can’t get new hardware/software in until we get it approved in the budget. Repeat ad nauseam.
Chances are, your and your employees’ lives are fully permeated with technology, from the very start of the day to the moment you close your eyes to sleep in the evening. That’s just how the world works these days, but there is evidence that this permeation of tech can have some adverse effects on us all. That’s why, as odd as it may sound coming from an IT provider, you may want to occasionally take a moment to step away from technology.
When you consider your business’ investments, you probably think about things such as the hardware your team uses and the software this hardware supports. You might think about the furniture you’ve purchased to outfit your office. On the other hand, one often overlooked but critical element that needs some level of investment is your employee satisfaction.
Over the past several weeks, we’ve been discussing procrastination as a concept and how it tends to manifest. To wrap up our discussion, we wanted to share a few ways that you might be able to greatly reduce your and your team’s tendencies to procrastinate so that more can be accomplished.
We’ve been examining the concept of procrastination in recent weeks - why we do it and how it often manifests itself in business processes. For our final few parts, we’ll be focusing on how you can stop procrastinating by utilizing both quicker, short-term tactics and long-term, sustained changes. Listed below are some short-term tactics.
We recently started to explore the concept of procrastination as a means of understanding it better, and potentially, getting better at not doing it. Last time, we touched on a few ways that procrastination can potentially manifest, so it only made sense to us that we would continue pulling that thread and try to help you identify how you tend to procrastinate more specifically.
“Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today.” It’s good advice, as well as some of the easiest and most tempting advice to ignore. Procrastination is one of those things that we all assume we understand, but we wanted to take a bit of time to explore it in greater detail…and figure out how we can all work to resist it.
One vital component of your business’ security is how well your team is trained to preserve it. Listed below are some of the aspects that you need to be sure you address as you educate your team.
Who are you? While it’s a question that has been asked in all contexts with all levels of metaphysicality attached—from asking someone their name to prompting someone to follow a path of spiritual self-discovery—the growth of the metaverse once again urges us to ask it in a more literal way. When accessing a conglomeration of various services and platforms, how many identities will each user need to juggle?
